“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it,” spoke my hero, Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And I do, too. I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace. I’ve lived very well and I’ve been deprived of all comforts. I’ve been as lonely as a person can be and I’ve enjoyed the company of heroes. I’ve suffered the deepest despair and experienced the highest exultation. I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.

I hope those who mourn my passing, and even those who don’t, will celebrate as I celebrate a happy life lived in imperfect service to a country made of ideals, whose continued service is the hope of the world. And I wish all of you great adventures, good company, and lives as lucky as mine.

The first person I talk to comes out guns blazing. I don’t even knock on his door. He just pops out with a “Hey there!”

“Hey, I’m Clif. I’m with the Democrats. I’m collecting signatures for some local candidates.”

“I used to be a Democrat,” he says, “back when they were conservative. Now they’re for the homosexuals and abortion, and they’re against God.”

I say, “Well, you know, I’m not a big fan of abortion, but I think the Democrats have it right. Number one, strangely enough, making more restrictive abortion laws doesn’t actually reduce the rate of abortion.* It’s like Barry Goldwater said: ‘It’s always been around, and it always will be.’* Things we know that help reduce the rate of abortion, though, like increased access to birth control and sex ed are things Democrats are generally for.”*

“Well, that’s true,” he says, “and that’s why I’m not strictly for one side or the other. But, I don’t know why everything has to be gay, gay, gay now. You can’t turn on the TV these days without homosexuals in everything. You know, I believe in the Bible, and the Bible makes it totally clear that homosexuality is wrong. Take Sodom and Gomorrah: God sends angels down to Lot, and the wicked men of the city try to have sex with them. Lot offers them his daughters — now that part’s terrible — but the men want the angels.”

I say, “Yeah, but I would point out that there are different ways to interpret these things. There are people out there who believe — I’m sure — just as strongly in God and the Bible who don’t think homosexuality is bad. In that verse you mentioned, for instance, they might say that God’s problem with the wicked men was not that they were homosexuals but that they wanted to rape strangers. Maybe God is just against people who want to rape other people.”*

He says, “Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who want to distort the truth. They try to call people like me an extremist just because I’ve been married to my wife for 52 years.”

I say, “Well, I wouldn’t call you that. I would just say that I have gay friends myself who I care for a lot. They’re people who I think suffered because they grew up around people who told them that they were bad. They couldn’t change this ‘bad’ thing about themselves, so it made them deeply unhappy. I think that’s terrible.”

He then tells me a bizarre story about a handsome nephew who he says was turned gay by his mom and sisters who would dress him up like a girl, in dresses and makeup. I let that one go. I liked that the guy called his nephew “a real head-turner,” though.

This was like a 20-minute conversation that I won’t recount all of here. It turns out that the guy doesn’t like Jeff Flake because Flake’s nephew apparently … neglected some dogs? The guy doesn’t like McCain because McCain is responsible for the shoddy condition of the VA apparently.

He talks about how you can’t have the Bible in schools anymore, but you can have the “yin yang.” I kinda regret not finding out what the “yin yang” is ….

Trump, though. There’s somethin’ about that Trump guy. He says, “Trump’s a guy who can’t be bought ’cause he’s already a billionaire.”

As I almost always do when I hear Trump’s name, I begin to vomit uncontrollably. No, I’m kidding. I just vomit in my mind. The mind vomit helps to cloud the mental image of Trump.

This ex-Democrat then says, “And the Mueller investigation — the Democrats are just dragging it out. It’s just a waste of taxpayer money.”

I start to say, “Well, the Republicans spent a lot of taxpayer money to investigate Hillary….”

Do people in red-leaning or blue-leaning states have a bigger carbon footprint?

Just looking at data from the Energy Information Administration from 2014, it looks like red states do produce more CO2 per capita:

I wanted to better quantify this, though, so I ran the data through a Pearson correlation calculator.* Here’s the dataset in case you’d like to check my work:

And, here are the results:

As you can see, mathematically, as the proportion of a state that was Republican or leaned Republican in 2014 went up, so did the state’s per capita CO2 emissions. The value of R is 0.549, a moderate positive correlation. R2: 0.3014.

For the sake of thoroughness, I performed the same calculation for the Democrats. Here’s that dataset:

Here’s the resultant graph:

The value of R is -0.5593, a moderate negative correlation. R2: 0.3128.

How well do states perform economically that have populations leaning Democrat or Republican? To try to answer this question, I took data from Gallup for 2016* to determine political leaning and compared it to data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis for state per capita GPD* using a Pearson correlation calculation.*

State Per Capita GDP vs Percent of States Identifying as Democrat or Lean Democrat

From the resulting graph, one might expect a slight positive correlation, and one would be right. The value of R is 0.462. Although technically a positive correlation, the relationship between the variables is weak. The value of R2, the coefficient of determination, is 0.2134.

* * *

For the sake of thoroughness, we can perform the same test for percentage of states that lean Republican:

State Per Capita GDP vs Percent of States Identifying as Rep or Lean Rep

From the resulting graph, one might expect a slight negative correlation, and this is what we find. The value of R is -0.4692. Although technically a negative correlation, the relationship between the variables is weak. The value of R2, the coefficient of determination, is 0.2201.

* * *

What, if anything does this prove? Primarily, it doesn’t appear that either Republicans or Democrats can strongly boast of improving the economy if that metric is based on per capita income. However, if one side did want to make the claim to being better for the economy, the analysis appears to support the Democrats. These results are similar to those I found in another Pearson correlation I performed using Gallup data in comparison to unemployment figures.

On April 14th, 2017, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2244 into law. The bill primarily calls for the following: “Constitutional and statutory requirements for statewide initiative measures must be strictly construed and persons using the initiative process must strictly comply with those constitutional and statutory requirements.”*

The bill as introduced by House Representative Eddie Farnsworth (R-12) pertained to concealed weapons permits and “electronic reports.” That bill’s text was stricken in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where all six Republicans voted in favor and all four Democrats voted against the measure to replace the bill’s language and intent.*

View Senate Appropriations Committee Votes

The bill passed the Senate with all Democrats opposing and all but one Republican voting in favor:*

Breakdown of Senate votes on HB 2244

Party Affiliation

Yes

No

Abstain

Total

Democrat

0

13

0

13

Republican

16

1

0

17

Total

16

14

0

30

View Senate Votes

In the House, the bill also passed exclusively with Republican votes:*

Breakdown of House votes on HB 2244

Party Affiliation

Yes

No

NV/E

Total

Democrat

0

23

2

26

Republican

34

0

1

34

Total

34

23

3

60

View House Votes

Legislators in favor of the bill note, in the text of the bill, that initiatives give “extraordinary power” to voters. They write that courts have required strict compliance when a legislative tool is considered an extraordinary power. In order to amend any voter-approved initiative, Arizona’s Voter Protection Act requires three-fourths of the state House and Senate to vote for the amendment. This stipulation inhibits the legislature from changing or correcting voter-approved measures. Thus, according to the authors of the bill, the initiative has become an extraordinary power, requiring that it be held to a standard of strict compliance to constitutional and statutory requirements.*

The measure could result in individual signatures or entire pages of signatures on petitions being thrown out due to minor instances of noncompliance. If a page has more than the maximum of 15 signatures, it could be thrown out. If an address is deemed to be illegible, the signature could be thrown out. If a petition sheet does not conform to size requirements, the entire page could be thrown out. A signature might also be stricken if the signer uses a shortened version of a name such as “Jim” for “James.”* Such rules were in place prior to the passage of this bill where 20 different discrepancies could result in a page of signatures or individual signatures from being counted. However, before HB2244, only “substantial compliance” was deemed necessary, allowing officials leeway in determining whether a minor example of noncompliance was serious enough to warrant rejection.*

Other Battles in the War

In addition to the strict compliance bill, Republicans authored House Bill 2023, signed into law by Governor Ducey on March 9th, 2016, which makes it a felony to collect and turn in ballots unless one is an election official, family member of the signer, or a mail carrier. Although presented as a way to protect the integrity of elections, no Republican has furnished evidence of a single instance in which someone has tampered with ballots. On the other hand, this law makes it impossible for organizations behind various initiatives to pay groups to collect ballots once initiatives have received a sufficient number of signatures to get them on the ballot.*

On March 23rd of this year, Governor Ducey signed House Bill 2404 into law, which outlaws pay-per-signature gathering of signatures on citizen initiatives. The bill also requires that signature collectors be paid minimum wage and raises the total days election officials have to verify signatures. Critics charge that, because of the law, signature collectors will have less incentive to collect as many signatures as possible. Legislator Doug Coleman, who voted in favor of the bill, responded that petition gatherers can simply use volunteers. However, an analysis of initiatives that went to ballot over four election cycles found that none made it using only volunteers.* As with HB2244 and HB2023, HB2404 was authored by and voted for exclusively by Republicans. As with HB2023, sponsors and passers cited concerns of protecting voters from fraud, though they again furnished no evidence that such fraud had occurred.* In fact, available evidence suggests that how signature-gatherers are paid has no relationship to prevalence of fraud.*

Detractors of the concept of initiatives argue that the “public legislature” allowed for by the initiative process contrasts with the Framers’ view of an elected republic that would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.”* Those more in favor of direct democracy might cite Jefferson who wrote that “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.”*

Arizona, like 24 other states, allows voters to propose initiatives, a law established in the state constitution at the state’s founding. Initiatives are laws or constitutional amendments proposed and voted on by voters which allow those voters to change the state government beyond and, in some cases, in opposition to what state legislators do. To get an initiative on an official ballot, a number of voters equal to 10% of the total number of voters who voted in the most recent gubernatorial election must sign a petition in favor of a particular proposal. Initiatives must be filed by the secretary of state no fewer than 4 months prior to the date of the election. Between 1970 and 2013, various entities attempted 425 petitions. Of those, 16% made it to the ballot. Of those, under half were approved by Arizona voters. This means, ultimately, that only 8% of petitions attempted became law over that period.*

Ballot initiatives have been controversial from the start. The first attempt to curtail initiatives came in 1916 after initiatives had passed granting women’s suffrage and instituting alcohol prohibition. This early attempt failed. The Voter Protection Act mentioned in the text of HB2244 was the result of a failed 1996 initiative to legalize marijuana. The initiative passed, but lawmakers gutted it the following year. In response, a 1998 initiative created the Voter Protection Act which requires 3/4 vote by state legislators in both chambers to repeal an initiative-created law and then only to “further the purpose” of the law. A criticism of the Voter Protection Act is that it caused a downgrade in the state’s credit rating. However, the state’s treasurer shows a current rating of “Very strong” from Standard & Poor’s, which is just below its best rating and very close to its rating over the past 10 years.*

The Future of Initiatives

Between 1970 and 2013, 67 of 425 initiatives made it to the ballot, less than half of those 67 becoming law. Because it currently takes more than 200,000 signatures to get an initiative onto the ballot,* it is already extremely difficult for citizens who do not feel adequately represented to defy the plans of the state’s dominant political faction.

In order to give a stronger voice to voters via the initiative process, electronic initiatives could be employed. An electronic voting system has already been successfully employed in the state since 2012 that allows state candidates to gather half of the signatures required for their nominations. A similar system could be employed for initiatives.* For now, though, unilateral efforts by members of a single party in the state, ostensibly created to protect the integrity of the initiative process and ballot-gathering, are instead more likely to reduce the ability of citizens who feel unrepresented to have a voice.